The Dangers of Rebuilding Society

[Scythe13]

Okay, this will cause some outrage, some obvious outcomes, and some very obvious replies. But what the toot, let's just get it out there and see how this goes.

Firstly, we all speak about the lack of community in the UK at the moment. We all recognise the issues that will cause WTSHTF and also during life post SHTF.

The real fun comes when, let's say 1 year, after the event, when things have settled down and life becomes semi-regular, e.g. most of the time is spent planting, harvesting, and the alike. Few MAJOR interruptions, if any.

I bet you're failing to see the problem right?

Here's the problem.

How will society be rebuilt? What role will you lead in the rebuilding?

Think about it. The rebuilding will involve interactions between survivor groups. That will involve trust. That could potentially require becoming slightly more vulnerable. OOOW!!! There's the real kicker isn't it?

If we are going to look at rebuilding a societal structure, or even build on interactions, then it will involve trusting another group. The other group might be 100% ethical and be an ideal group to meld with. Or they could just be a great acting bunch of bandits and thieves.

The issue is that for society to be rebuilt, it will require combining groups of people that will be having social interactions on a regular basis.

Is this something you'd be looking at joining in with?

Because of the way that so many of us are trying to spread into more rural areas, the odds of a city being created or even a medium sized town, is pretty small. HL for example has a good few miles from his next neighbour. Unlikely to move house to get closer to them.

So, in my opinion, the resurgence of society will be based around markets and selling to each other. People will meet together now and again, for shorter periods of time, however not permanently....to begin with.

There will be small, low intensity, gatherings, which will start to increase over time, for the intensity of the meet and the length of time spent together.

I do foresee an exception to this. Where a group that is trusted and recognised as being so, by all parties involves in the meeting, are there to 'guard' or watch over the activities of the people in the interactions. Not a policing force per-se, but recognised peace keepers that are trusted to....keep the peace (it's self-evident in their role as peace keepers). This kind of group would allow greater ease and lower tensions for everyone at the market, or in the communal meeting area.

What are your views on how the recreation of society will come about?

[bigpaul]

depends on what the survival rate is, if in the low numbers any survivors could be so well spread out that they wouldn't come into contact with another group. after surviving and managing on our own or in a small group would we then trust a group of strangers? could we even take that chance?

[John]

It will be impossible to rebuild civilization
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running.

We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, or at the least near impossible to get at without the power sources that we have now, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair.

A society increasing in complexity does so as a system. That is to say, as some of its interlinked parts are forced in a direction of growth, others must adjust accordingly. For example, if complexity increases to regulate regional subsistence production, investments will be made in hierarchy, in bureaucracy, and in agricultural facilities (such as irrigation networks). The expanding hierarchy requires still further agricultural output for its own needs, as well as increased investment in energy and minerals extraction. An expanded military is needed to protect the assets thus created, requiring in turn its own sphere of agricultural and other resources. As more and more resources are drained from the support population to maintain this system, an increased share must be allocated to legitimization or coercion. This increased complexity requires specialized administrators, who consume further shares of subsistence resources and wealth. To maintain the productive capacity of the base population, further investment is made in agriculture, and so on.

Of course, many of the survivors will want to rebuild civilization. The nature of catabolic collapse, however, will leave them with precious little to start with. As a self-reinforcing cycle, catabolic collapse is as unstoppable as the anabolic growth that currently drives us into ever-greater complexity. Both are self-reinforcing feedback loops, and both must run their course before any other direction can be taken. So we need not consider the case of an “interrupted” collapse, where civilization is rebuilt from the remains of the old. This will not be a return to the Dark Ages; it will be a return to the Stone Age.

How we be so sure of this?
The current state of civilization is dependent on resources that are now so depleted, that they require an industrial infrastructure already in place to gather those resources. When coal was first used as a fuel, it could simply be picked off the ground. Those surface deposits were quickly used up. When those were gone, coal mining began. It was more costly, but as coal became a necessary fuel, the cost was justified. The shallowest mines were exploited first. As they ran out, miners turned to deeper and deeper mines. Today’s mines are often hundreds of feet below ground, with access tunnels that must burrow through miles of earth. Mining so far below the earth is a dangerous job, made possible only by industrial machinery for ventilation, stabilization, and digging. We can fetch this fossil fuel only because we have fossil fuels to put to the task.

Again, the issue of peak oil leaves significant quantities of oil still in the ground. But it is deep in the earth, or under the sea, and often of a poorer quality, requiring more refinement. We can drill and refine this oil only because we have industrial equipment to build rigs and power refineries for the task. Any interruption in our civilization’s supply of fossil fuel would require any effort to rebuild civilization to start from scratch. Catabolic collapse is precisely such an interruption.

Civilization, as we have seen, is only possible through agriculture, because only agriculture allows a society to increase its food supply–and thus its population–and thus its energy throughput–and thus it’s complexity–so arbitrarily.

That level of complexity provides the agricultural society the ability to achieve other levels of complexity, such as crafting metal tools, state-level government, and advanced technology. Civilization only began when agriculture became possible, but does that mean that civilization can only appear based on agriculture? Yes, it does. Every culture must have some means of gathering food, and every means of gathering food can be placed into one of two categories: those where the people produce their own food, i.e., “cultivation,” and those where they do not.

The latter is referred to as “foraging.” There is an enormous diversity under that heading–far more than deserves such a bland, umbrella term, but all such forms share a number of things in common. Because the amount of food they consume depends on the amount of food available in their ecosystem, there is a caloric limit of how much they can consume. They cannot raise their food supply, because their food supply is not under their control. Cultivators can be further subdivided between those who operate above, and below, the point of diminishing returns. Below the point of diminishing returns, cultivators are called horticulturalists. Horticulture also places a caloric limit–however many calories can be produced below the point of diminishing returns. To produce more than this would require working above the point of diminishing returns, at which point they cease to be horticulturalists, and instead become agriculturalists. Agriculturalists can increase the number of calories they produce simply by increasing their inputs–thus, only agriculturalists can arbitrarily increase their energy throughput, so only agriculturalists can start a civilization.

Given that, how plausible is agriculture after the collapse?
Again, all but impossible. Plants, like any other organism, takes in nutrients, and excrete wastes. For plants, those are nutrients they take out of the soil, and waste they put into the soil. In nature, what one plant excretes as waste, another takes in as nutrients. They balance each other, and all of them thrive. But monoculture–planting whole fields of just one crop–sets fields of the same plant, all bleeding out the same nutrients, all dumping back in the same wastes. It is precisely the same effect as filling an empty room with people and sealing it completely off. Eventually, the entire room will be full of carbon dioxide, and there will be no more oxygen. Monoculture does to topsoil what locking yourself in a garage with your car engine running does to a human.
In 1988, the annual soil loss due to erosion was twenty-five billion tons and rising rapidly. Erosion means that soil moves off the land. An equally serious injury is that the soil’s fertility is exhausted in place. Soil exhaustion is happening in almost all places where civilization has spread. This is a literal killing of the planet by exhausting its fund of organic fertility that supports other biological life. Fact: since civilization invaded the Great Plains of North America one-half of the topsoil of that area has disappeared.

As that happened, we also invented ever more powerful petrochemical fertilizers to offset the death of the soil, giving the illusion that all was well. The Dust Bowl arose because our innovation was outpaced by the devastation. We quickly got back on top of it, leading us to the current situation. The Great Plains are essentially a desert. We grow most of the world’s corn on a thick layer of oil we have laid over its soil, long ago bled to death by the first wave of farmers in America.

The Fertile Crescent was not always a cruel joke. It was turned into a desert by agriculture in the very same way. At the moment, 40% of the earth’s surface is covered in farmland; most of that is no longer arable after being farmed for so long. Of the 60% that remains, most of it was never arable to begin with–that is why it was not farmed.

However, this is complicated by the more recent trend of global warming. Mounting evidence suggests that the massive increases in the scale of anthropogenic (Human impact on the environment) atmospheric change introduced by the Industrial Revolution may not simply have offset the earth’s natural cooling trend, but may have begun to reverse it. Regardless of which scenario follows the collapse, ice age or global warming, the one thing that will not be possible is a continuation of the status quo. No matter what follows, we will see the end of the Holocene, and with it, the end of any climate capable of supporting agriculture on any significant scale.

We are therefore talking about a complete break with the end of our current civilization. Whole generations will pass before it becomes feasible again. What, then, of the distant future, when another interglacial occurs, or when global warming stabilizes? Will we be able to rebuild civilization then?

After the passage of millennia, the soil may well heal itself, and the necessary climate may return. In that scenario, agriculture may be possible in those same areas, and under the same conditions, that it first occurred. Flood plains at a given climate are necessary. It needs to be an annual flood, and it needs to deposit new soil, to compensate for the depletion of the soil on a regular basis–but not so regular that the fields are flooded while the crops are still growing. And, they will need to exist in areas where domesticable plants live. All in all, a very precise set of circumstances already.

If agriculture does begin in such areas (and there can only be a dozen or less in the whole world), they will find themselves limited below a ceiling we did not suffer. In the course of our civilization, we used up all of the surface and near-surface deposits of all the economically viable metals on earth. The simple physical property of pounds per square inch will limit the technology of our little kingdoms to the Neolithic. No plow, however ingenious, can ever be made out of rock. In some directions, complexity will be allowed to flourish. In other directions–particularly lever-based machines, tools, and weapons–we will be very tightly circumscribed by the lack of any feasible materials. That limitation on technological complexity will necessarily limit all other forms of complexity, while some levels can gain complexity at the expense of others, that can only happen within certain parameters. This is why the Neolithic never saw state-level governments; only with the beginning of the Bronze Age did we see that development.

Likewise, the lack of metals will continue to limit technological development after the collapse–and by limiting technological development, it will limit all other forms of complexity.

The role of human ingenuity is marvellous, but not all-encompassing. Not every problem can be solved simply by the application of wits. Ambition and wits existed in plenty throughout the Palaeolithic, (Palaeolithic Age, Era or Period is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered (Grahame Clark's Modes I and II), and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory) yet we never developed the technology or complexity necessary to build a civilization, because complexity advances as a single thing, and always as a function of energy. The lever and the wedge are ultimately necessary–in the form of the plow and the sword–but these are not effective unless made of a material that can withstand sufficient pressure. The only such materials on earth are metals now buried so deep underground that only an industrial infrastructure can fetch them.

Our future Neolithic kingdoms will thus be constrained by problems of scale inherent to such low levels of complexity, lacking the technology to communicate quickly or easily, without effective weapons to suppress rebellion, without complex bureaucracies to administer large territories. They will effectively be limited to small city-states, incapable of expanding beyond that for the same problems of scale that inhibited so many of the civilizations of Mesoamerica, but more so.

There is the minor question of civilization’s waste, however. While mining the earth for metals may not be possible, mining our waste may be far more feasible. Of course, unattended metals rust quickly, and become unusable after a generation. However, our landfills preserve the garbage within remarkably. Might potential future civilizations mine landfills for new metals? There is, of course, an inherent limitation to such a proposition, in that the rate of that resource’s replenishment is zero. Even fossil fuels have some replenishment rate. Any such resources will quickly be depleted–such a civilization might have a chance for a brief flash of glory, barely entering something akin to a Bronze Age level of complexity before burning itself out.

With the passage of geological ages, though, this will pass. Fossil fuels will be replenished, and metal ores will rise to the surface. After ages of the earth have passed, and another ice age comes, and then an interglacial, then, if there are still humans so far into the future–this is a matter of at least tens of millions of years, far longer than humans have so far survived–then there might be another opportunity to rebuild civilization then, but that will be the first chance we have of rebuilding after this collapse, and that is if we as a species manage to survive that long.

Read, enjoy and digest.

[Mortblanc]

Yea, that really gives us something to work with and helps us out with our preps to no end!

[Scythe13]

Sorry John, I got most the way through that and I got caught up by the part that I think I'm reading wrong.

Towards the end, when you say "in such areas (and there can only be a dozen or less in the whole world)" do you mean only 12 agriculturally effective flood plains?

[TOF]

Wow, are you going to reference Jason Godesky there John?

http://rewild.info/anthropik/2006/01/the...index.html

And just to add a bit of balance, here's Jason's Thesis no.28 Humanity will almost certainly survive.

http://rewild.info/anthropik/2006/01/the...index.html

Personally, I think there will be somesort of society, but who knows what form it will take, feudal, or more collective.

[John]

Yes it is Jason but I am not saying that will not any form of society. What I am saying it never ever be anywhere like what we have now.

I also believe that tend to confuse matters by looking at society and civilisation as the same thing.

'and there can only be a dozen or less in the whole world'
This was just an estimate and you need to look at bigger picture.
Global climate change and possible rising sea levels and the loss of humans to keep water courses clear. Look at Somerset floods recently and think what it may be like with no one to clear or look after them.

The whole of life is complex and our complexity today is the only thing that allows to continue.

I amnot saying don't prep, what I am saying is try to look at what life may well look like in 100 years plus. Where do we get our materials from, longer term. Once the last bullet is used, the last whatever breaks how do you 100 years plus post collapse replace that. Back to I pencil again.

This is what I don't many either accept or fully appreciate.

[MaryN]

Really interesting point, Scythe, but there are so many variables aren't there? I can't see humanity (those humans surviving that is) living separate little hermit-like lives, so there is going to be some form of "society", probably starting with small family units - much like medieval England, I should imagine - and gradually spreading into larger groups. I would imagine that most folks will be very shocked by such a great breakdown, so trust and interest in other folks will be a bit thin on the ground at first.

I'm fascinated by how you envisage the end before the new beginning. With billions of people over the planet, not to mention the 60millions plus in the UK, just how do you get rid of the debris from the collapsed bit, not to mention millions of bodies. Just to be a bit morbid, I suppose you could reuse bones and whatnot as building material. Certainly, there would be no need to worry about mining for materials - just reuse everything from all around you. Unless you envisage everything as disappearing in a puff of smoke, and survivors being left with absolutely nothing??

Agriculture will always be there, and the wherewithal to rejuvenate the land will come from people, as necessary. Global warming may well be a bit of an issue, but if the pollution levels die down then perhaps that might help to slow it down a bit.

So many variables. Fascinating stuff.

[Jace]

I'm not sure if any other members have been to China, however having lived here for over a decade, I have seen first hand what happens when society breaks down. If you look at the mindset of the generation that grew up or lived through the various campaigns (Cultural Revolution etc), which all ended in millions of deaths through famine and violence, you can see how that has shaped the mindset of everyone over the age of 50 or so.

People of this age are mostly loath to help anyone outside of their own family or locational group. There is wide suspicion and discrimination against anyone who isn't from their local area (who are blamed for all ills), while people refuse to line up or wait in turn for anything (I guess due to fighting for food when younger). This is dissipating a little now though, as the younger generation are trying to get their parents to realise things have changed, but you can see many people are still haunted by what happened and don't believe that things really are different.

While the situation is obviously different from what may happen now in the UK or US etc, I think that that deep-down distrust of others will come out pretty quickly WTSHTF, and will see family groups or small villages being the biggest "civilisations" for many years after a total breakdown.

[Scythe13]

Interesting stuff Jace. The reluctance to help someone from outside does make sense. What if it was a more mutually beneficial relation? Say a farmer might be reluctant to feed a random stranger. What about teaming up with a soldier for protection? Farmer feeds soldier. Soldier protects farmer. That kind of thing?